The beginning of 2017 has been turbulent in SINA and literally blown of our roof. While a big storm has taken off the roof of our main hall in March and left us with huge challenges on the way forward for the entire building,
2017 has also already seen amazing successes for SINA and its scholars:
Our new upcoming startup Wastics Recycling has won the “Youth Scaling the Impact of Social innovation Competition” sponsored by the Mastercard Foundation and walked away with a hefty cash prize to boost their startup. SINA Founder Etienne Salborn has been selected to be part of the Ashoka Changemakers (so far there are 300 changemakers worldwide) and were invited for the first-ever Ashoka ChangemakerXchange in Sub-Saharan Africa. They met 23 other leading changemakers from 12 different African countries in Nairobi.
SINA has now started first preparations to scale its “Purpose Safari” empowerment and self-organized learning model into DRC. Two SINA scholars are coming originally from Bukavu and would like to take the SINA model to their home communities. Since October 2016 the SINA model has been successfuly replicated by refugee scholars in the Nakivale Refugee Settlement as “SINA OPPORTUNIGEE” and is impacting 40 refugee youth, who are going through the Purpose Safari, discovering their strenghts and purpose and create a social enterprise out of it to positively impact the refugee settlement, while also making a sustainable living.
Five SINA members successfully attended the International Intensive Training for Nonviolent Communication in Kenya and made crucial connections for further scaling of SINA into Kenya and possibly also Somalia. We will keep you posted with developments of creating a network of self-organized SINA learning spaces for social entrepreneurship across Africa to transform education!